Summary

The author begins this chapter with the story of Apple co-founder Stephen Wozniak and his meeting with the Homebrew Computer Club in California in 1975. She makes the point that his innovations were not the result of collaboration but instead came from solitary work sessions. He has advised people who want to come up with similar innovations to work alone. The author then cites studies conducted by Institute of Personality Assessment and Research that found that people who were creative in different fields were socially adept introverts. The author writes that these results do not mean that introverts are more creative than other people but that they may benefit from working in solitude, which is the springboard for creativity. However, we increasingly teach our kids and instruct our workers in what the author calls "groupthink." Cultural observers such as Malcolm Gladwell extol the benefits of...